Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Forty-five years since the Baghdad hangings

Of the nine Jewish 'spies', four were under the legal age for execution. A tenth, Jamal Hakim, also underage, had a Jewish father.

Holocaust Memorial Day coincides with the day in 1969 when nine Jews were hanged in Baghdad. The Germans have done much to show contrition for the Holocaust. When will the Iraqis apologise? Lyn Julius blogs in the Jerusalem Post:

Forty-five years later, the community and its representatives are still reeling with the consequences of that fateful day.

Following the defeat of Arab armies on all fronts by Israel in the
1967 Six Day War and the 1968 ‘war of attrition’, the 3,000 Jews who
remained in Iraq following the mass migration of the 1950s were being
singled out for vengeance by the Iraqi regime. Dozens of Jews had been
arrested and imprisoned. The remainder were placed under virtual house
arrest. One Jewish girl remembers that secret service men installed
themselves in armchairs opposite her house in order to keep her family
under 24-hour surveillance. The tension was such that she and her mother
made a suicide pact.

Jewish bank accounts were frozen. Jews lost their jobs. Jewish
students were not allowed to pursue their university studies. Foreign
trade agencies were taken away from Jews and handed over to Muslims.
Telephones were cut off. There was no escape: Jews had to carry yellow
identity cards and could not obtain the necessary passports in order to
leave the country. They were virtual hostages to the regime.

Antisemitism intensified with the rise to power of the Ba’ath
party. Saddam Hussein was its deputy leader. Before long the regime had
concocted a story of ‘Zionist espionage’. The stage was set for a show
trial of unspeakable cruelty and cynicism. Of nine Jews falsely accused
of being Zionist spies, four were under the legal age to face execution.
No matter – the regime falsified their ages. Five other victims were
Christians and Muslims.

Morris Abdulezer, an Iraqi Jew now living in Canada, describes the lead-up to the hangings:

“These innocent men were tortured then put through a televised
mockery of a military trial, which culminated in nine of them being
publicly hanged, one acquitted.

“I can recall precisely how terrified and confused we
were throughout the entire trial and, more precisely, the night of
January 26 when the guilty verdict was announced by the military judge.
We did not believe that the sentence of death by hanging would be
carried out because the whole court process did not make sense, from the
defendants who were not allowed to appoint their own lawyers, to the
stories and accusations that were outrageous and full of lies, where the
defendants were being asked to bear witness against each other.

“We waited in fear, praying and trusting in our Jewish faith
and hoping for pressure to come at the last minute from the
international community to end this mockery.”

But when international pressure did come - it was too late.

The reign of terror continued. Iraq’s rulers promised that there
would be further hangings. Every citizen was urged to inform against
their Jewish neighbours. Linda Menuhin, a columnist living in Israel
recalls that her own father was abducted on the eve of Yom Kippur 1972
on the way to the synagogue: “We don’t know what happened to my father
exactly. Until today we have never said Kaddish for him.” Her search for
information on her father is now the subject of a film, Shadow in Baghdad.

Raphail Soffer was a small child when his father was arrested on
trumped-up charges and executed in Abu-Ghraib prison in Baghdad on 25
August 1969. He was one of around fifty Jews executed, abducted, or who
simply vanished without trace. While the hangings triggered the mass
illegal departure of the remaining Jews, Raphail’s mother could barely
feed her children, let alone hand over bribes to the authorities, or pay
Kurdish smugglers to spirit the family over the northern border into
Iran.

During the Iran-Iraqi war in the 1980s, Raphail was among 13 Jews
conscripted into the Iraqi army. He was one of just 20 men out of 120 in
his artillery unit to survive the war. Raphail, his mother and his two
sisters, one of whom was mentally disturbed since being beaten aged
three over the head by her teacher, had to wait to leave Iraq until Jews
were permitted passports in the 1990s.

The advent of ‘democracy’ in Iraq has changed little for the Jews. Iraq is no safer for Jews or less hostile than it was.

There is much unfinished business. The Iraqis have never
acknowledged their responsibility for the suffering and forced exodus of
150,000 Jews, the country’s most ancient community. The government has
never compensated them for confiscated property. The World Organisation
of Jews from Iraq, based in New York, has made repeated calls for
information on Iraq’s 'disappeared ones’, without success.

A current source of friction is the fate of the so-called Jewish archive.
In June 2014, the US is committed to returning to Iraq - and not to its
exiled rightful Jewish owners - thousands of documents, books and
Torah scrolls seized from the Jewish community and shipped to Washington
for restoration. The Iraqis claim the archive is part of their national
heritage. Although only five Jews still live in Baghdad, post-Saddam
Iraq says it tolerates minorities and values their contribution.

While the events of 27 January 1969 in Baghdad cannot remotely
compare to the enormity of the Holocaust - the impulse for both was the
same: man’s inhumanity to man. There the similarity ends. The Germans
have done all they can to show contrition for the Holocaust. When will
Iraq issue an apology to its Jews?

1 comment:

Anonymous
said...

yOU ASK THE QUESTION/WHEN WILL THE iRAQIS APOLOGISE,? i DO NOT THINK THEY WILL EVER DO SO;wHAT ABOUT eGYPTIANS,apart from the hangings in Iraq, lots of young men and women went to these smelly jails in the middle of the desert.And apart from one or two, none want to speak about what happened thereHatred of Jews in ARab lands is widespreadvery honestly, it is not going to end very soon.sultana

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In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)